Field of the Invention apparatus for recognizing an environment surrounding a vehicle. More specifically, the present invention relates to a vehicle environment recognizing apparatus that determines
The present invention generally relates to a vehicle environment recognizing a degree of curvature of a road on which a vehicle is traveling and, more particularly, for determining if the road is straight.
Background Information
Conventional technology has been proposed for recognizing an environment surrounding a vehicle. An example of such a technology is a white line recognizing apparatus that is disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2000-242899. The white line recognizing apparatus disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2000-242899 uses an onboard camera to capture an image of a road in front of the vehicle, and calculates straight lines (approximation lines) approximating a left white line and a right white line by detecting white line candidate points in the road image. Then, a degree of curvature of the road is determined based on a deviation between the approximation lines and the white line candidate points. If the road is linear (straight), then an intersection point of the left and right approximation lines is treated as an imaginary vanishing point. Additionally, a detection frequency histogram for imaginary vanishing points is crated and an optical axis direction is estimated based on a maximum frequency value. The estimated optical axis direction is used to execute an optical axis revision with respect to the onboard camera.